Editorial methodology
How standings are decided
The directory assigns every company a standing. This page explains what each one means, what evidence sits behind it, who assigns it, and how a company contests it.
The five standings
Recommended
Verified track record, transparent terms, consistently positive author reports.
Listed
In the directory with no significant concerns on file, and not enough data for a recommendation.
Caution
Documented concerns: unclear contracts, upselling, slow payment, or unresolved complaints.
Watchlist
Multiple documented, corroborated author reports of serious issues, or regulatory or legal action on record.
Disputed
The publisher has formally responded and the matter is under review.
What counts as evidence
Only material we can show you. Every item behind a standing is published on the profile with a date, a source link, and an archived copy taken when we cited it. In practice that means:
- Court filings, regulatory findings and consumer-agency records
- The company’s own published terms, contracts and price lists
- Archived versions of pages that have since changed
- News coverage from outlets that name their sources
- Corroborated first-hand author reports, where the reporting author has supplied documentation to a moderator privately
A single unverified complaint is not evidence. Neither is a low review average. Neither is a competitor’s opinion.
Reviews do not set standings
This is the part people most often assume works the other way. Author reviews are user speech: we moderate them against the review guidelines, we display an aggregate score, and we never rewrite them. The standing is an editorial judgement made by a named editor. Nothing in our system converts a rating average into a tier, and we do not run any job that recalculates standings on a schedule.
Who assigns a standing
A person, with a name, whose name is recorded against the change. Ruth Kelleher, editor, is accountable for every standing in the directory. Each change is logged with the previous tier, the new tier, a written reason and a timestamp, and that history is published on the profile.
Before a Caution or Watchlist standing
- We assemble the documentation and archive each source.
- We contact the company at its published address, set out what we intend to publish, and record the date of the attempt.
- We allow 10 business days for a response, and publish any response we receive verbatim alongside the standing.
- An editor assigns the tier with a written reason.
If a company responds after publication, the response goes up and the profile moves to Disputed while the response is reviewed.
How to contest a standing
Write to editor@authorsdaily.com from an address at the company’s own domain, or claim the profile and submit a response through it. Tell us specifically which documented item you dispute and what the correct position is.
We respond within 10 business days. Factual errors are corrected and logged publicly. Where we are satisfied the assessment no longer holds, the standing moves and the reason is published. Where we are not, the standing stays and your response stays published next to it.
What we will not do is remove a review because a company asked us to. Reviews are corrected when they contain factual errors, with a visible edit note.
Commercial independence
A company on Caution or Watchlist may buy a press release or advertise with us. It has no bearing on its standing, and there is no mechanism in the product that would allow it to. We publish this rule because someone will test it.